Forum Discussion
Memorable MemberError messages from Microsoft managed vnet gateway
Has anyone else attempted to use the managed vnet gateway? It became available as a public preview in March:
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-vnet-connectivity-for-pbi-datasets-public-preview/
Here is more explanation: https://microsoft-bitools.blogspot.com/2021/09/virtual-network-data-gateway-for-power.html
The concept is great, but the implementation is not so great. When there is a dataset refresh failure, we will see errors like so:
Unknown error in data gateway. One or more failures have occurred.
... which means what? This message is not actionable, and will not enable you to avoid the problem in the future. They might have just said "oops something bad happened". This error is transient and this error (or equally meaningless variations of it) will appear in about 50% of the scheduled refresh operations.
A quick google search reveals that it is easy to troubleshoot an on-prem gateway:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/service-gateway-onprem-tshoot
... however nothing in this article will help you if the gateway is managed by Microsoft.
In the very least there should be a way to harvest the logs off the gateway, assuming the failure happened in the past 24 hours. I've called Power BI support and even they have no access to the gateway logs.
Has anyone else tried using managed vnet gateways? Have you used them long enough to encounter a failure in a dataset refresh? How do you troubleshoot? Do you have a direct line to someone on the product team? (I was told they could help us, but I haven't connected with them yet - even after a week of intermittent failures in production.)
3 Replies
v-xiaotangCommunity Support
Hi dbeavon3
Sorry to hear that.
Can you roughly infer under what circumstances this problem will occur? If the dataset is small, will this problem occur?
Based on my research, you can enable the Azure Virtual network diagnostic settings to get the log,
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/essentials/diagnostic-settings?tabs=CMD
Best Regards,
Community Support Team _Tang
If this post helps, please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.
dbeavon3Hi v-xiaotang. Are you sure that the azure monitor diagnostic settings will send out the Power BI Gateway logs (ie. the logging that is specific to gateway logic)?
... Here is how you get the equivalent logs when they live on-premises:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/data-integration/gateway/service-gateway-tshoot#collect-logs-from-the-on-premises-data-gateway-appI had opened a support case and was told there may be some bug somewhere in the vnet gateway that is being fixed, but they didn't go into detail. Nor did they give me confidence that the error messages in the "refresh history" will improve in quality. I tend to doubt that.
- dbeavon3
Hi v-xiaotang ,
I see that the roadmap is promising to give us more troubleshooting for the VNET gateway .
https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Data-Stories-Gallery/Power-BI-Release-Plan/m-p/930557
.... "VNet data gateway troubleshooting" ... for "March 2022"
Do you have details about this?
Hopefully this allows us to see the gateway logs. I'm not sure how it makes any sense for Microsoft to run this "gateway" service, without providing access to the logs. The logs are critical to the on-prem version of the gateway, and it would be impossible manage the health of the gateway without those logs.